Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, having negotiated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939, is greeted by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and other officials in Berlin. From “The Second World War: Prelude to Conflict” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

War in Europe ending with Germany’s unconditional surrender, May 1945.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was among the statesmen who gathered in France in June 1919 to sign the Treaty of Versailles, an agreement that did little to heal the wounds of World War I and set the stage for World War II. From “The Second World War: Prelude to Conflict” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.

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major treatment

before 1945

Alsace-Lorraine

Historically, the area was at the centre of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire in the 9th century and later became part of the Germanys of the Holy Roman Empire, remaining a German territory under various sovereignties up to the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) concluding that war gave control of Alsace-Lorraine to France.

anti-homosexual laws

...enabling any form of sexual behaviour between men to be prosecuted (lesbian sexual relations—because they were unimaginable by male legislators—were not subject to the law). Likewise, in Germany in the early 1870s, when the country was integrating the civil codes of various disparate kingdoms, the final German penal code included Paragraph 175, which criminalized same-sex male...

Balkans

The depression fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, and his advent caused the Balkan states to consider measures for their collective security. In 1934, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, and Romania signed the Balkan Entente, which attempted to guarantee the independence of the signatories. Despite strong efforts to bring Bulgaria into the fold, no government in Sofia dared state...

...Alexander’s personal regime, concentrated contracts for military production and new plants in Serbia and Bosnia. In 1934 Alexander had accepted the sort of bilateral trade agreement that Nazi Germany was offering to other southeastern European countries. It increased trade otherwise restricted by rates of international currency exchange but also tied a significant percentage of...

Belarus

...party in Russia took place in Minsk in 1898, when a small congress laid the foundation for the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. During World War I (1914–18), heavy fighting between German troops and those of the Russian Empire took place in the province with considerable destruction. Following the Russian Revolution, in which a provisional government replaced the collapsed...

between world wars

...the prewar world would have made the task of peacemaking daunting even if the victors had shared a united vision, which they did not. Central and eastern Europe were in a turmoil in the wake of the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman collapses. Revolution sputtered in Berlin and elsewhere, and civil war in Russia. Trench warfare had left large swaths of northern France, Belgium, and Poland...

...incident and invaded Poland in force on the morning of Sept. 1, 1939. The British and French parliaments, confident that their governments had turned every stone in search of peace, declared war on Germany on September 3.

anti-Semitism

A novelty of the Nazi brand of anti-Semitism was that it crossed class barriers. The idea of Aryan racial superiority appealed both to the masses and to economic elites. In Germany anti-Semitism became official government policy—taught in the schools, elaborated in “scientific” journals and research institutes, and promoted by a huge, highly effective organization for...

...he had once defied, and he taught Midrash (interpretative rabbinical literature) and homiletics at the Berlin Lehranstalt. He was called away from this to preside over the end of the 1,000-year-old German Jewish community.

deportation program

The largest mass expulsion is probably that imposed by the Nazi government of Germany, which deported 7,000,000–8,000,000 persons, including some 5,000,000 Jews later exterminated in concentration camps. After World War II, 9,000,000–10,000,000 ethnic Germans were more or less forcibly transported into Germany, and perhaps 1,000,000 members of minority groups deemed politically...

fascism

In 1949 Fritz Dorls and Otto Ernst Remer, a former army general who had helped to crush an attempted military coup against Hitler in July 1944, founded the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei; SRP), one of the earliest neofascist parties in Germany. Openly sympathetic to Nazism, the SRP made considerable gains in former Nazi strongholds, and in 1951 it won 11 percent of the vote...

forced labour

Forced labour has existed in various forms throughout history, but it was a peculiarly prominent feature of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (especially during the rule of Joseph Stalin), in which it was used on a vast scale. Under these regimes, persons either suspected of opposition or considered racially or nationally unfit were summarily arrested and placed...

Great Depression

...a relatively short downturn in the early 1930s. The French recovery in 1932 and 1933, however, was short-lived. French industrial production and prices both fell substantially between 1933 and 1936. Germany’s economy slipped into a downturn early in 1928 and then stabilized before turning down again in the third quarter of 1929. The decline in German industrial production was roughly equal to...

National Socialism

totalitarian movement led by Adolf Hitler as head of the Nazi Party in Germany. In its intense nationalism, mass appeal, and dictatorial rule, National Socialism shared many elements with Italian fascism. However, Nazism was far more extreme both in its ideas and in its practice. In almost every respect it was an anti-intellectual and atheoretical movement, emphasizing the will of the...

Nazi Germany, in fact, was Europe’s most elaborately developed dictatorship. Characteristically, Hitler took great care with the design of its emblem, a black swastika in a white circle on a red background; as iconography, it has long survived its regime. The swastika, originally the obverse of the Nazi version, was an Eastern mystic symbol brought into Europe in the 6th century—and Nazi...

propaganda program

...in 1927 and served as its editor and later, from 1940 to 1945, served as editor of
Das Reich—the additional post of propaganda director for the NSDAP for all of Germany. Goebbels began to create the Führer myth around the person of Hitler and to institute the ritual of party celebrations and demonstrations that played a decisive role in converting the...

...reactor. Two or more reactors may of course attach quite different meanings to the same symbol. Thus, to Nazis the swastika was a symbol of racial superiority and the crushing military might of the German
Volk; to some Asiatic and North American peoples it is a symbol of universal peace and happiness. Some Christians who find a cross reassuring may find a...

reparation payments

arrangement for Germany’s payment of reparations after World War I. On the initiative of the British and U.S. governments, a committee of experts, presided over by an American financier, Charles G. Dawes, produced a report on the question of German reparations for presumed liability for World War I. The report was accepted by the Allies and by Germany on Aug. 16, 1924. No attempt was made to...

restoration policy

When the Allied powers concluded the Treaty of Versailles with defeated Germany, they provided for a plebiscite in Upper Silesia, which contained a large Polish population, to determine whether that territory should remain a part of Germany or be attached to Poland. The plebiscite was finally held on March 20, 1921, after the Poles in Upper Silesia had staged two armed uprisings (August 1919...

...of varying composition under three chancellors ranging from the left to centre. His policy was aimed at securing a reconciliation with the victorious Western powers, especially France, for Germany had already renewed ties with Russia through the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922. By meeting the reparation payments, for the reduction of which he fought as stubbornly as he did for removal of...

Third International

...set forth by Stalin: once again, moderate socialists and social democrats were branded as the chief enemies of the working class. The dangers of the rising fascist movement were ignored. In Germany in the early 1930s, the communists focused their attacks on the social democrats and even cooperated with the Nazis, whom they claimed to fear less, in destroying the Weimar Republic. World...

Hoping to exploit the political and economic turmoil afflicting central Europe after the Allied victory, Moscow sent agents with ample supplies of money to stir up unrest. In Germany three revolutionary efforts undertaken with the help of local communists and sympathizers—in early 1919, in 1921, and again in 1923—failed, partly from the passivity of the workers, partly from...

Young Plan

(1929), second renegotiation of Germany’s World War I reparation payments. A new committee, chaired by the American Owen D. Young, met in Paris on Feb. 11, 1929, to revise the Dawes Plan of 1924. Its report (June 7, 1929), accepted with minor changes, went into effect on Sept. 1, 1930. It reduced the amount due from Germany to 121,000,000,000 Reichsmarks in 59 annuities, set up the Bank for...

Christian Socialism movement

...half of the 19th century. The Protestant Association for the Practical Study of Social Questions, founded in 1888, opposed bourgeois Protestantism while rejecting a strict, egalitarian socialism. In Germany, the movement for Christian social action in the late 19th century became associated with violent anti-Semitic agitation. Adolf Stoecker, a court preacher and a founder of the Christian...

colonialism

African partition

The second feature of the new imperialism was also strongly evident. It was in Africa that Germany made its first major bid for membership in the club of colonial powers: between May 1884 and February 1885, Germany announced its claims to territory in South West Africa (now South West Africa/Namibia), Togoland, Cameroon, and part of the East African coast opposite Zanzibar. Two smaller nations,...

Cameroon

In spite of the predominant role of the British along the coast, in 1884 the Germans claimed the region as Kamerun. The explorer Gustav Nachtigal arrived in July 1884 to annex the Douala coast. The Germans moved inland over the years, extending their control and their claims. Initially, their major dealings were with African traders, but direct trade with the interior promised greater profits,...

China

In 1898, when the Western imperialist powers were rushing to extract concessions from the weakened Qing dynasty, Germany obtained the use of Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern coast of the Shandong Peninsula, and the right to construct a naval base at Qingdao there. After World War I began, Japan joined the Allies and took over German interests in the peninsula. At the same time (1915), it presented...

...fleet in the 1880s, the Chinese government realized the strategic importance of Qingdao (at the time known as Jiao’ao) and set up a minor naval station and building fortifications there. In 1897 the German government, which had ambitions in this area, dispatched a force to occupy Qingdao; the next year it forced the Chinese government to pay an indemnity and to grant Germany a 99-year lease on...

...of the 19th century, Shandong came under the influence of German, British, and Japanese interests. It was occupied briefly by Japanese troops after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. In 1897 Germany landed troops, and in 1898 a treaty was signed by which China ceded to Germany, for 99 years, two entries to Jiaozhou Bay and the islands in the bay and granted the right to construct a naval...

East Africa

As Germany, Britain, and France were carving up East Africa in the mid-1880s, they recognized the authority of the sultan of Zanzibar over a coastal strip 10 miles (16 km) wide between the Tana (in Kenya) and Ruvuma (in Tanzania) rivers. The hinterland, however, was divided between Britain and Germany: the British took the area north of a line running from the mouth of the Umba River, opposite...

Germany had hoped that no battles with Britain would be fought on African soil during World War I, but Britain was concerned with its communications with India and with the safety of the Ugandan railway. Britain initiated hostilities, to which Germany responded, with Britain ultimately prevailing in East Africa. The conflict caused great hardships for the African population. Thousands of...

It was left to Germany, with its newly awakened interest in colonial expansion, to open up the country to European influences. The first agent of German imperialism was Carl Peters, who, with Count Joachim von Pfeil and Karl Juhlke, evaded the sultan of Zanzibar late in 1884 to land on the mainland and made a number of “contracts” in the Usambara area by which several chiefs were...

German East Africa

former dependency of imperial Germany, corresponding to present-day Rwanda and Burundi, the continental portion of Tanzania, and a small section of Mozambique. Penetration of the area was begun in 1884 by German commercial agents, and German claims were recognized by the other European powers in the period 1885–94. In 1891 the German imperial government took over administration of the...

...imperialist ventures followed these evangelical endeavours. Nothing of great moment, however, occurred until 1885, when a German, Carl Peters, riding a tide of diplomatic hostility between Germany and Britain in Europe, secured the grant of an imperial charter for his German East Africa Company. With this the European scramble for Africa began. In east-central Africa the key occurrence...

German–Herero conflict of 1904–1907

The areas of German South West Africa (now Namibia) were formally colonized by Germany between 1884–90. The semiarid territory was more than twice as large as Germany, yet it had only a fraction of the population—approximately 250,000 people. In contrast to Germany’s other African possessions, it offered little promise for large-scale mineral or agricultural extractions. Instead,...

maintenance of sphere of influence

...to carry on the mutual competition for colonies peacefully through agreed-upon procedures. Agreements on spheres of influence served this purpose. Thus, the agreement between Great Britain and Germany in May 1885, the first to make use of the term, provided for “a separation and definition of their respective spheres of influence in the territories on the Gulf of Guinea.” This...

Marshall Islands

...(11.4 square km) and a lagoon that is easily accessible and provides a good anchorage. The first missionaries to the Marshall Islands landed on Jaluit in 1857. The atoll was also the site (1885) of Germany’s formal declaration of a protectorate over the islands. Chosen as an administrative centre by Germany, it continued as such under the Japanese. Heavily fortified by the Japanese, Jaluit was...

...(1803) and Otto von Kotzebue (1815 and 1823). U.S. whalers frequented the islands from the 1820s, and U.S. and Hawaiian Protestant missionaries began efforts to convert the islanders in the 1850s. Germany established a coaling station on Jaluit Atoll by treaty with island chiefs and in 1886, by agreement with Great Britain, established a protectorate over the Marshalls. Japan seized the...

Nauru

...diseases. Intraisland warfare among competing districts escalated, becoming particularly intense in the 1880s. Encouraged by a few German traders concerned about their own interests on the island, Germany incorporated Nauru into its Marshall Islands protectorate in late 1888. The German administration and the arrival of the missionaries shortly thereafter brought an end to armed hostilities....

New Guinea

...the southeastern quadrant. Despite early gold finds in British New Guinea (which from 1906 was administered by Australia as the colony of Papua), it was in German New Guinea, administered by the German imperial government after 1899, that most early economic activity took place. Plantations were widely established in the New Guinea islands and around Madang, and labourers were transported...

Northern Mariana Islands

By the 19th century the Marianas had become involved in European colonial rivalries. German and British soldiers and settlers began to encroach on Spanish claims in Micronesia, and difficulties were averted in 1886 by the mediation of Pope Leo XIII, whose efforts in this regard prevented war between Germany and Spain. But Spain’s empire was weakening, and by 1898 war with the United States was...

Pacific Islands

Annexed by Germany in 1884, the archipelago was named for the German statesman Otto von Bismarck. The Germans developed copra plantations, but nonnative diseases carried by the Europeans killed many people on the islands. The archipelago was occupied by Australia in 1914 and made a mandated territory of Australia in 1920. The group was seized with little difficulty by Japan during World War II;...

...even when Godeffroy failed in 1879, the Deutsche Handel und Plantagengesellschaft (German Trading and Plantation Company) took over, and Samoa remained the favourite colony of the colonial party in German politics. The British government appointed consuls to some islands, but their powers to maintain order were limited and, except for the visits of warships, unenforceable. The United States...

Papua New Guinea

In the 20th century the two territories finally linked in Papua New Guinea were administered by the Germans, British, and Australians. The colonial governments had no official symbols of local relevance, although a proposed coat of arms for German New Guinea—never adopted because of Germany’s involvement in World War I—featured a bird-of-paradise. In 1962 a local flag also...

Portuguese-African conflict

village, Cabo (Cape) Delgado province, extreme northeastern Mozambique, East Africa, just south of the Rio Rovuma. In 1886 Germany and Portugal had agreed on the Rovuma as the boundary between then German East Africa (now Tanzania) and Portuguese Mozambique, but the Germans later claimed (1892) that Portugal had no rights north of Cabo Delgado, approximately 20 miles (32 km) south of the...

...officially neutral, Portugal at the outbreak of World War I had proclaimed its adhesion to the English alliance (August 7, 1914) and on November 23 committed itself to military operations against Germany. On September 11 the first expedition left to reinforce the African colonies, and there was fighting in northern Mozambique, on the Tanganyika (now Tanzania) frontier, and in southern Angola,...

Rwanda

During the colonial era, Germany and later Belgium assumed that ethnicity could be clearly distinguished by physical characteristics and then used the ethnic differences found in their own countries as models to create a system whereby the categories of Hutu and Tutsi were no longer fluid. The German colonial government, begun in 1898 and continuing until 1916, pursued a policy of indirect rule...

Solomon Islands

...being exploited for labour to work the plantations of Fiji and other islands and of Queensland, Austl. About 30,000 labourers were recruited between 1870 and 1910. To protect their own interests, Germany and Britain divided the Solomons between them in 1886; but in 1899 Germany transferred the northern islands, except for Buka and Bougainville, to Britain (which had already claimed the...

South West Africa

The Germans were the last imperial power to arrive in Africa. Their annexation and control of South West Africa was eased by the intense cleavages that had opened up between the local Nama and the Herero chiefdoms, a result of their increasing involvement in the world economy during the 19th century.

...Bay were seen as forerunners of the northward expansion of the Cape Colony. However, London proved reluctant to take on added costs in an apparently valueless area, and the way was left open to German colonial annexation as South West Africa in the 1880s. The acquisitions, by exceedingly dubious “treaties” and more naked theft, did not go smoothly, despite the employment of...

Even before the discovery of gold, the South African interior was an arena of tension and competition. Germany annexed South West Africa in 1884. The Transvaal claimed territory to its west; Britain countered by designating the territory the Bechuanaland protectorate and then annexed it as the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land north of the Limpopo...

Sperrgebiet

...century, and a few diamonds were found on some of these islands in 1905–06. Major discoveries of diamonds in 1908 on the mainland in the vicinity of the port of Lüderitz led to the German colonial government’s closing of the area to unauthorized persons later in the same year. In 1920 the assorted German-owned mining companies of the northern Sperrgebiet (the Lüderitz...

Steiermark

...Age and mined as early as the Bronze Age, the region became part of the Celtic kingdom of Noricum, which was incorporated into the Roman Empire
c. 15
bc. In the 5th century it was overrun by Germanic tribes, followed by the Avars and their Slav subjects (Slovenes). Subjected by the Bavarians in the 8th century, the country became a mark, or frontier territory, of the Frankish Empire....

Togo

German missionaries arrived in Ewe territory in 1847, and German traders were soon established at Anécho. In 1884 Gustav Nachtigal, sent by the German government, induced a number of coastal chiefs to accept German protection. The protectorate was recognized in 1885, and its coastal frontiers with Dahomey and the Gold Coast were defined by treaties with France and Great Britain. German...

Togoland

...east. Inhabited by a mixture of Ewe and other peoples, it became a political unit in 1884, when, in the European scramble for overseas territories, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck claimed it for Germany and other European powers formally recognized the claim. The Germans intended to make Togoland a model colony. Because the region lacked mineral resources (its phosphate reserves were not...

western Africa

...on the march in western Africa. The principal effect of the new forces stemming from domestic power rivalries in Europe itself—the most dramatic of which was the appearance in 1884 of the German flag on the Togoland coast, between the Gold Coast and Dahomey, and in the Cameroons—was to intensify and to accelerate existing French and British tendencies to exert their political...

Western Samoa

...their warships. They subsequently signed the Berlin Act to provide for the neutrality of the islands and to avoid further conflict; however, in 1899 the United States annexed eastern Samoa, whereas Germany annexed the western part of the islands—Western Samoa. The division was carried out without consulting the Samoan people, and many of them resented it deeply.

Zanzibar

(July 1, 1890), arrangement between Great Britain and Germany that defined their respective spheres of influence in eastern Africa and established German control of Helgoland, a North Sea island held by the British since 1814. The treaty was symptomatic of Germany’s desire for a rapprochement with Great Britain after the abandonment of a Bismarckian entente with Russia.

conflicts

Baltic War of Liberation

(1918–20), military conflict in which Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania fended off attacks from both Soviet Russia and Germany. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been part of the Russian Empire since the end of the 18th century, but after the Russian Revolution of 1917 they became independent states. After World War I ended, however, Soviet Russia, hoping to advance through the Baltic...

Battle of Dresden

(Aug. 26–27, 1813), Napoleon’s last major victory in Germany. It was fought on the outskirts of the Saxon capital of Dresden, between Napoleon’s 120,000 troops and 170,000 Austrians, Prussians, and Russians under Prince Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg.

Battle of Sedan

...led to the fall of the Second French Empire; it was fought at the French border fortress of Sedan on the Meuse River, between 120,000 French troops under Marshal Mac-Mahon and more than 200,000 German troops under General Helmuth von Moltke.

Franco-German War

(July 19, 1870–May 10, 1871), war in which a coalition of German states led by Prussia defeated France. The war marked the end of French hegemony in continental Europe and resulted in the creation of a unified Germany.

Italian wars

The French invasion of Italy marked the beginning of a new phase of European politics, during which the Valois kings of France and the Habsburgs of Germany fought each other, with the Italian states as their reluctant pawns. For the next 60 years the dream of Italian conquest was pursued by every French king, none of them having learned anything from Charles VIII’s misadventure except that the...

Peasants’ War

(1524–25) peasant uprising in Germany. Inspired by changes brought by the Reformation, peasants in western and southern Germany invoked divine law to demand agrarian rights and freedom from oppression by nobles and landlords. As the uprising spread, some peasant groups organized armies. Although the revolt was supported by Huldrych Zwingli and Thomas Müntzer, its condemnation by...

Schleswig-Holstein conflict

...and Holstein have at times been subject to the claims and counterclaims of Denmark, Sweden, the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, and Austria. The region has had Danish minorities in predominantly German areas and German minorities surrounded by Danes, and consequently its history has been one of border and sovereignty disputes and, more recently, accommodations.

...now turned to foreign policy in the hope that success on this front would weaken the electorate’s clear desire for political reform. Trouble had been brewing since 1848 between the Danes and the German population of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. (Both duchies were in union with Denmark; Schleswig, however, had a large German population, and Holstein was a member of the German...

Seven Weeks’ War

...war between Prussia on the one side and Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and certain minor German states on the other. It ended in a Prussian victory, which meant the exclusion of Austria from Germany. The issue was decided in Bohemia, where the principal Prussian armies met the main Austrian forces and the Saxon army, most decisively at the Battle of Königgrätz. A Prussian...

Thirty Years’ War

...Protestant nobles of both Bohemia and Austria rose up in rebellion. Ferdinand won after a five-year struggle. In 1625 King Christian IV of Denmark saw an opportunity to gain valuable territory in Germany to balance his earlier loss of Baltic provinces to Sweden. Christian’s defeat and the Peace of Lübeck in 1629 finished Denmark as a European power, but Sweden’s Gustav II Adolf, having...

...and cellars and reappeared on tax rolls; ruined villages were rebuilt and wastelands were tilled; a smaller population was healthier and readily procreative. The devastation was patchy. Northwestern Germany, for example, was little affected; some cities, such as Hamburg, actually flourished, while others, such as Leipzig and Nürnberg, quickly responded to commercial demand. The...

Wars of Religion

Germany, France, and the Netherlands each achieved a settlement of the religious problem by means of war, and in each case the solution contained original aspects. In Germany the territorial formula of
cuius regio, eius religio applied—that is, in each petty state the population had to conform to the religion of the ruler. In France, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 embraced the...

diplomacy

Algeciras Conference

...French special interests in Morocco. France’s attempt to implement the agreement by presenting the Moroccan sultan with a program of economic and police “reforms” brought the indignant German emperor William II to Tangier in March 1905. William challenged French intentions by affirming the sovereignty of the Sultan and demanding the retention of the “open door” for...

Anti-Comintern Pact

agreement concluded first between Germany and Japan (Nov. 25, 1936) and then between Italy, Germany, and Japan (Nov. 6, 1937), ostensibly directed against the Communist International (Comintern) but, by implication, specifically against the Soviet Union.

Berlin Congress

Dominated by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the congress solved an international crisis caused by the San Stefano treaty by revising the peace settlement to satisfy the interests of Great Britain (by denying Russia the means to extend its naval power and by maintaining the Ottoman Empire as a European power) and to satisfy the interests of Austria-Hungary (by allowing it to occupy...

Berlin West Africa Conference

...forbade slave trading; and rejected Portugal’s claims to the Congo River estuary—thereby making possible the founding of the independent Congo Free State, to which Great Britain, France, and Germany had already agreed in principle.

Brest-Litovsk treaties

...22. They were divided into several sessions, during which the Soviet delegation tried to prolong the proceedings and took full advantage of its opportunity to issue propaganda statements, while the Germans grew increasingly impatient.

...of March 3, 1918—which concluded World War I hostilities between the new Soviet government and the Central Powers—the Soviet government recognized the independence of Ukraine. German troops promptly occupied the country and set up a puppet Ukrainian government in Kiev, but it collapsed with the German surrender to the Allies in November 1918 and the subsequent withdrawal...

Immediately on taking over, the Bolsheviks proposed to the belligerent countries an end to the fighting. The Germans and Austrians promptly agreed to the proposal. In negotiations held at Brest-Litovsk, an armistice was arranged (December 1917). This was to be followed by a peace treaty. The Germans, however, posed extremely harsh conditions, causing a split in the Bolshevik high command: Lenin...

Dreikaiserbund

an alliance in the latter part of the 19th century of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, devised by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. It aimed at neutralizing the rivalry between Germany’s two neighbours by an agreement over their respective spheres of influence in the Balkans and at isolating Germany’s enemy, France.

Dual Alliance

...and military pact that developed between France and Russia from friendly contacts in 1891 to a secret treaty in 1894; it became one of the basic European alignments of the pre-World War I era. Germany, assuming that ideological differences and lack of common interest would keep republican France and tsarist Russia apart, allowed its Reinsurance Treaty (
q.v.) with Russia to lapse in...

German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact

(August 23, 1939), nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union that was concluded only a few days before the beginning of World War II and which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

Lausanne Conference

(June–July 1932), conference that was held to liquidate the payment of reparations by Germany to the former Allied and Associated powers of World War I. Attended by representatives of the creditor powers (Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy) and of Germany, the conference resulted in agreement on July 9, 1932, that the conditions of world economic crisis made the continued...

League of Nations

...which had no power other than that of its member states, was unable to take action. Discredited by its failure to prevent Japanese expansion in Manchuria and China, Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, and Hitler’s repudiation of the Versailles treaty, the League ceased its activities during World War II. In 1946 it was replaced by the United Nations, which inherited many of its purposes and methods...

Locarno, Pact of

(Dec. 1, 1925), series of agreements whereby Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy mutually guaranteed peace in western Europe. The treaties were initialed at Locarno, Switz., on October 16 and signed in London on December 1.

Munich Agreement

(September 30, 1938), settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. After his success in absorbing Austria into Germany proper in March 1938, Adolf Hitler looked covetously at Czechoslovakia, where about three million people in the Sudeten area were of German origin. It became known in May 1938 that...

Rapallo, Treaty of

(April 16, 1922) treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, signed at Rapallo, Italy. Negotiated by Germany’s Walther Rathenau and the Soviet Union’s Georgy V. Chicherin, it reestablished normal relations between the two nations. The nations agreed to cancel all financial claims against each other, and the treaty strengthened their economic and military ties. As the first agreement concluded...

Reinsurance Treaty

(June 18, 1887), a secret agreement between Germany and Russia arranged by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck after the German-Austrian-Russian Dreikaiserbund, or Three Emperors’ League, collapsed in 1887 because of competition between Austria-Hungary and Russia for spheres of influence in the Balkans. The treaty provided that each party would remain neutral if the other became involved...

Triple Alliance

secret agreement between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed in May 1882 and renewed periodically until World War I. Germany and Austria-Hungary had been closely allied since 1879. Italy sought their support against France shortly after losing North African ambitions to the French. The treaty provided that Germany and Austria-Hungary were to assist Italy if it were attacked by France...

Versailles Treaty

peace document signed at the end of World War I by the Allied and Associated Powers and by Germany in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919; it took force on January 10, 1920.

Public opinion in France and Britain wished to impose harsh terms, especially on Germany. French military circles sought not only to recover Alsace and Lorraine and to occupy the Saar but also to detach the Rhineland from Germany. Members of the British Parliament lobbied to increase the reparations Germany was to pay, despite the objections of several farsighted economists, including John...

Vienna Congress

...and Venice and got back most of Tirol. Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden on the whole did well. Hanover was also enlarged. The outline of a constitution, a loose confederation, was drawn up for Germany—a triumph for Metternich. Denmark lost Norway to Sweden but got Lauenburg, while Swedish Pomerania went to Prussia. Switzerland was given a new constitution.

Westphalia Peace

European settlements of 1648, which brought to an end the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Dutch and the German phase of the Thirty Years’ War. The peace was negotiated, from 1644, in the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück. The Spanish-Dutch treaty was signed on January 30, 1648. The treaty of October 24, 1648, comprehended the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand III, the...

effect of Lutheranism

...spirit obliged Leo X to excommunicate him. The problem became of as much concern to the emperor as it was to the pope, for Luther’s eloquent writings evoked a wave of enthusiasm throughout Germany. The reformer was by instinct a social conservative and supported existing secular authority against the upthrust of the lower orders. Although the Diet of Worms accepted the excommunication...

Melanchthon and education reform

...an outline of education for the elementary grades, which was enacted into law in Saxony to establish the first public school system. Melanchthon’s educational plan was widely copied throughout Germany, and at least 56 cities asked his advice in founding schools. Through his lectures and textbooks, and the teachers he trained, Melanchthon exercised great influence in Protestant Germany. He...

Enlightenment

In Germany the Aufklärung found its highest expression in a science of government. One explanation lies in the importance of universities. There were nearly 50 by 1800 (24 founded since 1600); they were usually the product of a prince’s need to have trained civil servants rather than of a patron’s zeal for higher learning. Not all were as vigorous as Halle (1694) or Göttingen (1737),...

foreign relations

Austria

The Germans themselves also experienced a certain degree of national fervour, but in their case it was part of a general German yearning for national unification. Responding to calls for a meeting of national unity, in May 1848 delegates from all the German states met at Frankfurt to discuss a constitution for a united Germany. Made up primarily of the commercial and professional classes, this...

...division of Austrian zones of Allied occupation was delayed until July 1945. Shortly before the Potsdam Conference (which stipulated that Austria would not have to pay reparations but assigned the German foreign assets of eastern Austria to the U.S.S.R.), control machinery was set up for the administration of Austria, giving supreme political and administrative powers to the military...

...conducted the foreign affairs of Austria-Hungary with the intention of preserving the status quo. Discarding the anti-Bismarck bias of his predecessor, Beust, he sought the friendship of the German Empire in order to strengthen his position in a possible confrontation with Russia over problems in the Balkans. The Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors’ League) of 1873, by which Franz Joseph and...

By this time (spring of 1933), Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany, and Nazi propaganda for the incorporation of Austria was greatly increased. Dollfuss turned to fascist Italy and authoritarian Hungary for help, as he was convinced that British and French aid would be ineffective. This shift in foreign policy also can be attributed to the fact that Dollfuss had to rely ever more strongly on...

Austria-Hungary

...Habsburg interests in Balkan affairs. Facing the possibility of conflict with Russia in this area, Austria-Hungary had looked for an ally, with the result that in 1879 Austria-Hungary and the German Empire had joined in the Dual Alliance, by which the two sovereigns promised each other support in the case of Russian aggression. The signing of the Dual Alliance was Andrássy’s last...

In the meantime, the German government had taken control of the situation. Placing German strategic and national plans over Austro-Hungarian interests, Germany changed the Balkan conflict into a continental war by declaring war against Russia and France.

Baltic states

...was sent to Estonia about a century later. In 1219–20 Valdemar II, king of Denmark, conquered much of northern Estonia. By the late 12th century, Scandinavian intruders had been joined by Germans, who between 1198 and 1290 overran the remainder of what is now Estonia and Latvia. The Liv territories had succumbed by 1207. Most of Latgalia suffered the same fate a year later. Estonia...

...outside world through Finland and Sweden. Each suffered heavily from German repression in the spring and summer of 1944. During the fall of 1944, most of the region reverted to Soviet control. The Germans held out in western Lithuania until early 1945 and in Courland until the capitulation of May 8, 1945.

Meinhard, a monk from Holstein, landed in 1180 on what is now the Latvian coast and for 16 years preached Christianity to the Livs, a Finno-Ugric tribe. His successor, Berthold of Hanover, appointed bishop of Livonia, decided that the sword had to be used against the recalcitrant pagans. He was killed in 1198 in battle. Albert of Buxhoevden, who succeeded him as bishop, proved himself a shrewd...

During the time of the Crusades, German—or, more precisely, Saxon—overseas expansion reached the eastern shores of the Baltic. Because the people occupying the coast of Latvia were the Livs, the German invaders called the country Livland, a name rendered in Latin as Livonia. In the mid-12th century, German merchants from Lübeck and Bremen were visiting the estuary of the...

Belgium

On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The Netherlands capitulated after 6 days, Belgium after 18. France, which along with Britain had sent troops to Belgium, had to lay down arms three weeks later. The British troops, covered by the Belgian army, retreated from Dunkirk, France, in particularly dramatic circumstances. The Belgian government fled the country,...

Brussels

The German occupation of Belgium during World War I lasted from August 1914 to November 1918. Numerous social relief movements were instituted; among them, the National Committee for Relief and Food had its headquarters in Brussels and, with U.S. aid, organized the feeding of the Belgian population. Adolphe de Max, the burgomaster of Brussels, acquired fame for his resistance to the abuses of...

Bulgaria

...proclaimed neutrality. Tsar Boris, however, appointed a new government under a notorious Germanophile, Bogdan Filov, and moved steadily closer to the German orbit. This was especially the case after Germany and the Soviet Union, then allied by the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, forced Romania to restore the southern Dobruja to Bulgaria in August 1940.

Czechoslovakia

...1922. Czech anticlerical feeling precluded the negotiation of a concordat with the papacy until 1928, when an agreement settled the most serious disputes between church and state. Ultimately, it was Germany that most strongly influenced the course of Czechoslovak foreign affairs. One of Beneš’s highest priorities was to prevent the union of Austria and Germany. Nevertheless, the relations...

...new Košice government exercised jurisdiction in the eastern portion of Czechoslovakia while fighting continued in Moravia and Bohemia until early May 1945. On May 5 an uprising against the German troops concentrated in central Bohemia started in Prague. Appeals for Allied help were largely ignored. Troops under U.S. Gen. George S. Patton reached Plzeň (Pilsen) but, complying...

Denmark

In the years leading up to World War I, it became increasingly important to define Germany’s intended attitude toward Denmark in the event of a European conflict. The Germans were well aware that the Schleswig affair had left a good many Danes with a loathing for everything German, and the constant friction between the Danish minority and the German administration in Schleswig increased the...

Finland

By the end of the 12th century, competition for influence in the Gulf of Finland had intensified: German traders had regular contacts with Novgorod via Gotland, and Denmark tried to establish bases on the gulf. The Danes reportedly invaded Finland in 1191 and again in 1202; in 1209 the pope authorized the archbishop of Lund to appoint a minister stationed in Finland. The Swedish king...

Greece

Though he accepted token British military aid, Metaxas, until his death in January 1941, was anxious to avoid provoking German intervention in the conflict. However, his successor agreed to accept a British expeditionary force as it became apparent that Hitler’s aggressive designs extended to the Balkans. The combined Greek and British forces, however, were able to offer only limited resistance...

Hungary

...program, particularly as Horthy at first refused to allow him to hold elections. Neither was he able to realize his foreign political ideal of an “Axis” composed of Hungary, Italy, and Germany, since his two proposed partners were then at loggerheads over Austria. Gömbös, one of whose first acts had been to dash to Rome and breathe new life into Hungary’s friendship with...

Italy

...without much reference to parliament. In 1881 the French occupation of Tunisia alarmed the government, and the following year, to avoid diplomatic isolation, Italy joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. This was essentially a defensive alliance guaranteeing German and Austrian support against any attack by France, Italy’s main rival in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Italy...

...Italo-Ethiopian War antagonized the British and French governments, led to sanctions by the League of Nations, and isolated Italy diplomatically. Mussolini moved into Hitler’s orbit, hoping that German backing would frighten the British and French into granting further concessions to Italy. However, the policy failed to bring further territorial gains in Africa. Furthermore, Italy became the...

Japan

...and manufacturing privileges was signed in 1896. Japan thus marked its own emancipation from the unequal treaties by imposing even harsher terms on its neighbour. Meanwhile, France, Russia, and Germany were not willing to endorse Japanese gains and forced the return of the Liaotung Peninsula to China. Insult was added to injury when Russia leased the same territory with its important naval...

In November 1936 Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and later with Italy. This was replaced by the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, which recognized Japan as the leader of a new order in Asia; Japan, Germany, and Italy agreed to assist each other if they were attacked by any additional power not yet at war with them. The intended target was the United States, since the Soviets...

Lithuania

By late 1915 Lithuania had come under German military occupation. The goal of the German administration was to create a Lithuanian state that would be a satellite of Germany after the final peace treaty. It authorized a gathering in Vilnius, on Sept. 18–22, 1917, of a congress of 214 Lithuanian delegates. The gathering called for an independent Lithuanian state within ethnic frontiers...

Netherlands

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Dutch sedulously maintained their neutrality, although their sympathies lay overwhelmingly with the Allied powers. Nonetheless, when Nazi Germany undertook the campaign against France in the spring of 1940, its forces struck not only against Belgium in order to outflank the French defenses but also against the Netherlands. The Dutch land armies were...

Norway

...by the war at sea, about half of Norwegian merchant shipping being lost. Because the Allied powers could almost totally control Norway’s foreign trade, they forced it to break off exports of fish to Germany and, at the same time, forbade exports of iron pyrites and copper, which were important commodities for the German war industry. Because of the many casualties caused by German submarine...

Ottoman Empire and Turkey

The Ottoman entry into World War I resulted from an overly hasty calculation of likely advantage. German influence was strong but not decisive; Germany’s trade with the Ottomans still lagged behind that of Britain, France, and Austria, and its investments—which included the Baghdad Railway between Istanbul and the Persian Gulf—were smaller than those of France. A mission to Turkey...

...and France (October 19, 1939) was not implemented because of Germany’s early victories. After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941), there was popular support for an alliance with Germany, which seemed to offer prospects of realizing old Pan-Turkish aims. Although a nonaggression pact was signed with Germany (June 18, 1941), Turkey clung to neutrality until the defeat of the...

Poland

Facing the crucial problem of Poland’s relationship to the two pillars of medieval Christendom, the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, Mieszko battled the expansive tendencies of the former—a record that dates from 963 refers to a struggle with the German dukes—while he sought reliance on Rome, to which he subordinated his state in a curious document, the ...

The situation for Poles in Prussia at times appeared critical. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s anti-Polish policies culminated in the Kulturkampf, designed to strengthen the cohesion of the newly created German Empire. In addition, policies of cultural and linguistic Germanization and German settlement in the provinces continuously threatened the Polish and Roman Catholic character of...

...the period. Twenty years of independence had given the Poles a new confidence that proved essential in the trials of World War II. Poland’s international position between an inimical and revisionist Germany (which constantly denounced the “corridor” separating it from East Prussia) and the Soviet Union was dangerous from the start. The tasks of Polish diplomacy during the interwar...

Polish Corridor

...lay along the lower course of the Vistula River and consisted of West Prussia and most of the province of Posen (Poznań), which the Treaty of Versailles (1919) transferred from defeated Germany to Poland. Perhaps no provision of the treaty caused so much animosity and resentment among Germans than this arrangement, for the corridor ran between Pomerania and East Prussia and...

pre-World War I Europe

By the early years of the 20th century the major imperialist gains had been completed, but some of the excitement that the process had generated remained, to spill back into European diplomacy. Germany had begun construction of a large navy, for example, in the late 1890s, in part to assure its place as an imperialist power; but this development, along with Germany’s rapid industrial surge,...

Prussia

Frederick, the third king of Prussia, ranks among the two or three dominant figures in the history of modern Germany. Under his leadership Prussia became one of the great states of Europe. Its territories were greatly increased and its military strength displayed to striking effect. From early in his reign Frederick achieved a high reputation as a military commander, and the Prussian army...

Both by his accomplishments and by his example Frederick deeply influenced the course of German history. In the struggles of the 1740s and ’50s he weakened still further the tottering structure of the Holy Roman Empire. The bitter Austro-Prussian rivalry that he began was to be a dominant political force in Germany and central Europe for well over a century. Not until the final Prussian victory...

Romania

...thereby guaranteeing his kingdom’s security and vital interests. To this end Carol and a small number of ministers made Romania a member of the Triple Alliance in 1883. The primary attraction was Germany, whose military and economic power they admired and hoped to use as protection against Russia. But the majority of Romanians were sympathetic to France, and for this reason the treaty was...

Russia

Russia’s acquisition of Ingria and Livonia (and later of Kurland) brought into the empire a new national and political minority: the German elites—urban bourgeoisie and landowning nobility—with their corporate privileges, harsh exploitation of native (Estonian and Latvian) servile peasantry, and Western culture and administrative practices. Eventually these elites made significant...

During the second half of the 19th century, Russian foreign policy gave about equal emphasis to the Balkans and East Asia. The friendship with Germany and Austria weakened, and in the 1890s the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy stood face to face with a Dual Alliance of France and Russia.

...a partly successful reorganization of industry to concentrate on military production, and by late 1916 the army was better supplied than ever before. But life on the home front was grim. The German and Turkish blockade choked off most imports. The food supply was affected by the call-up of numerous peasants and by the diversion of transport to other needs. The strain of financing the war...

The German invasion in June 1941 resulted in much of Ukraine being overrun. Many Ukrainians welcomed the Wehrmacht (German armed forces). Stalin was already displeased with the Ukrainians, and this reinforced his feelings. (In his victory toast after the war, he drank to the Russian triumph over the Germans.) This was in line with Stalin’s wartime policies, through which he rehabilitated the...

Spain

...the republic. Because of his military ability and prestige, a political record unmarred by sectarian politics and conspiracies, and his proven ability to gain military assistance from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Franco was the obvious choice. In part because he was not a typical Spanish “political general,” Franco became head of state of the new Nationalist...

...to win control of the entire country, a bloody civil war ensued, fought with great ferocity on both sides. The Nationalists, as the rebels were called, received aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union, as well as from International Brigades, composed of volunteers from Europe and the United States.

Both sides sought help from abroad. General Franco appealed immediately to Hitler in Germany and to Benito Mussolini in Italy, both of whom supplied aircraft early in the war. In return for mineral concessions, the Germans supplied the Condor Legion (100 combat planes), and the Italians sent some 70,000 ground troops; both supplied tanks and artillery. This support proved crucial to Franco’s...

Sweden

...Gustav Adolf negotiated with France for its support against the German emperor, whose armies threatened the south shores of the Baltic. In 1630 Gustav Adolf with his Swedish army landed in northern Germany, joining in the Thirty Years’ War. In 1631 Sweden concluded its treaty with France, and, at Breitenfeld in that same year, the Swedish army practically annihilated the imperial forces under...

...Oscar II (ruled 1872–1907) reoriented the country’s foreign policy. The new German Empire, under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, excited his admiration. At the same time, connections with Germany became much closer, and from the mid-1870s Swedish politics were influenced by a close friendship with Germany, which was emphasized during the last years of the 19th century by the growing...

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany resulted in a reexamination of Sweden’s defense policy, which in 1936 was amended to strengthen the country’s defenses. Sweden followed a strictly neutral course, in close collaboration with the other Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. As a consequence, Hitler’s proposal in the spring of 1939 for a nonaggression pact was...

Ukraine

...the Right Bank, as Soviet troops occupied Kiev. On February 9 Ukraine and the Central Powers signed the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A German-Austrian offensive dislodged the Bolsheviks from Kiev in early March, and the Rada government returned to the capital. In April the Red Army retreated from Ukraine.

...than 500,000 Ukrainians, were included in the administrative region of Poland established by the Nazis. A limited linguistic and cultural revival in the heavily Polonized area was permitted under German oversight, but political activities were banned, except for the OUN. The OUN itself was rent by factional strife between the followers of Andry Melnyk, who headed the organization from abroad...

United Kingdom

The British declaration of war on Germany on August 4, 1914, brought an end to the threat of civil war in Ireland, which since March had occupied Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet almost to the exclusion of everything else. Formally at least, party warfare came to an end. The Conservatives agreed not to contest by-elections and to support the government in matters pertaining to the...

Chamberlain, rather than Baldwin, has always been regarded as the man of appeasement. Historically this is correct only in the sense that Chamberlain formulated a policy of accommodation with Germany and Italy. But Chamberlain was also the man who began British rearmament, pronounced appeasement a failure, and declared war upon Germany. Baldwin was equally zealous to avoid any sort of...

U.S.

...made it seem that the worst of the depression was over. Then, in the spring of 1931, another crisis erupted. The weakening western European economy brought down a major bank in Vienna, and Germany defaulted on its reparations payments. Hoover proposed a one-year moratorium on reparations and war-debt payments, but, even though the moratorium was adopted, it was too little too late. In...

When Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, Roosevelt called Congress into special session to revise the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents (in reality only Great Britain and France, both on the Allied side) to purchase munitions on a cash-and-carry basis. With the fall of France to Germany in June 1940, Roosevelt, with heavy public support, threw the resources of the...

American Revolution

Because troops were few and conscription unknown, the British government, following a traditional policy, purchased about 30,000 troops from various German princes. The
Lensgreve (landgrave) of Hesse furnished approximately three-fifths of that total. Few acts by the crown roused so much antagonism in America as that use of foreign mercenaries.

U.S.S.R.

The Soviet government paid particular attention to relations with Germany, which it saw as the key to a European revolution. Aware of Germany’s bitterness over the Treaty of Versailles, Moscow, both directly and through the German Communist Party, identified itself with nationalist forces and incited hostility against France and Britain. A by-product of this policy was secret collaboration with...

From 1933 to 1934 the context changed abruptly. Hitler’s accession to power in Germany had been facilitated by Moscow’s refusal to let the German Communist Party cooperate against him with the Social Democrats and others. In fact, Nazi rule was at first interpreted as a victory for the communists, in that capitalism had been driven to its last resource, of naked force, and must soon collapse....

individualism

...negative connotation was employed by French reactionaries, nationalists, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, despite their different views of a feasible and desirable social order. In Germany, the ideas of individual uniqueness (
Einzigkeit) and self-realization—in sum, the Romantic notion of individuality—contributed to the cult of...

Industrial Revolution

...Their bourgeoisie lacked the wealth, power, and opportunities of their British, French, and Belgian counterparts. Political conditions in the other nations also hindered industrial expansion. Germany, for example, despite vast resources of coal and iron, did not begin its industrial expansion until after national unity was achieved in 1870. Once begun, Germany’s industrial production grew...

interaction with

Churchill

In 1911 the provocative German action in sending a gunboat to Agadir, the Moroccan port to which France had claims, convinced Churchill that in any major Franco-German conflict Britain would have to be at France’s side. When transferred to the Admiralty in October 1911, he went to work with a conviction of the need to bring the navy to a pitch of instant readiness. His first task was the...

Clemenceau

The armistice signed by the defeated Germans on November 11, 1918, proved him right and brought him, the last survivor of those who had protested at Bordeaux in 1871 against the harsh terms imposed on France, the satisfaction of seeing Alsace-Lorraine returned to France. Clemenceau found that building the peace was a more arduous task than winning the war. He wanted the wartime alliance to be...

Daladier

French politician who as premier signed the Munich Pact (Sept. 30, 1938), an agreement that enabled Nazi Germany to take possession of the Sudetenland (a region of Czechoslovakia) without fear of opposition from either Britain or France.

Enver Paşa

In 1914 Enver, as minister of war, was instrumental in the signing of a defensive alliance with Germany against Russia. When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers (November 1914), Enver cooperated closely with German officers serving in the Ottoman army. His military plans included Pan-Turkic (or Pan-Turanian) schemes for uniting the Turkic peoples of Russian...

Henry II

...what is now the west of France from the northernmost part of Normandy to the Pyrenees, near Carcassonne. During his reign, the dynastic marriages of three daughters gave him political influence in Germany, Castile, and Sicily. His continental dominions brought him into contact with Louis VII of France, the German emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), and, for much of the reign, Pope Alexander III....

Kállay

...the regent of Hungary, to form a government that would reverse the policies of László Bárdossy, whose government had involved the country in a dangerous dependence on Nazi Germany. Under the Kállay government (March 9, 1942–March 19, 1944), Jews enjoyed a degree of protection almost unparalleled on the European continent, and the press and the parties of...

Lenin

...soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar. Lenin and his closest lieutenants hastened home after the German authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany to neutral Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort.

Palmerston

...proved more than a match for Palmerston. The union of modern Italy, which Palmerston supported, the American Civil War, in which his sympathies were with the Confederacy, and the rise of Bismarck’s Germany, which he did not understand, were developments that reshaped the world in which he had been able to achieve so much by forceful opportunism. When Palmerston died, in October 1865, it was...

Judaism

...more aesthetic than doctrinal. The external aspects of Jewish worship—i.e., the form of the service—was unacceptable to the newly Westernized members of the Jewish bourgeoisie in both Germany and the United States, whose cultural standards had been shaped by the surrounding society and who desired above all to resemble their Gentile peers. Thus, the short-lived Reform temple...

Kruger telegram

(Jan. 3, 1896), a message sent by Emperor William II of Germany to Pres. Paul Kruger of the South African Republic (or the Transvaal), congratulating him on repelling the Jameson Raid, an attack on the Transvaal from the British-controlled Cape Colony. The telegram was interpreted in the Transvaal as a sign of possible German support in the future. William’s intention was to demonstrate to the...

manorialism

...since that was the best way to ensure labour services for grain-growing demesnes. So by the 16th century manorialism had been re-created on a large scale in eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Germany, Poland, and Russia. These reactionary manorial developments were not reversed in eastern Europe until the 19th century in most cases.

medieval Europe

Crusades

Conrad left in May 1147, accompanied by many German nobles, the kings of Poland and Bohemia, and Frederick of Swabia, his nephew and the future emperor Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa). Conrad’s poorly disciplined troops created tension in Constantinople, where they arrived in September. Conrad and Manuel, however, remained on good terms, and both were apprehensive about the moves of King...

Investiture Controversy

conflict during the late 11th and the early 12th century involving the monarchies of what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire (the union of Germany, Burgundy, and much of Italy), France, and England on the one hand and the revitalized papacy on the other. At issue was the customary prerogative of rulers to invest and install bishops...

Italy

...e di Gisla, who assumed the crown of Italy as Berengar II. Adelaide summoned the German king, Otto I (936–973), son of Henry the Fowler, to her aid. Although much involved in affairs in Germany, he came to Italy in 951 and married Adelaide, but he returned quickly to Germany to deal with a rebellion by Liudolf, duke of Swabia, his son from an earlier marriage. Moreover, events in...

Buoyed by early success in northern Italy, Frederick returned to Germany. He even hoped to repair his differences with Gregory, who proved amenable. However, the attempted settlement broke down. On Nov. 27, 1237, Frederick, back in Italy, dealt the Lombards a heavy blow in the Battle of Cortenuova. He followed his military success with a strong propaganda attack, chiefly directed against...

modern state origins

1830 Revolutions

...did not support the Poles, who had revolted against the Russian tsar. Their revolt was ruthlessly suppressed, and Poland was incorporated into the Russian Empire. Revolts in Italy and the German kingdoms were equally unsuccessful. Belgium declared its independence from the Netherlands, and it was recognized in 1831 as a separate nation. For several years the Greeks had been fighting...

Erfurt Union Parliament

(March 20–April 29, 1850), conference called by Prussia to form a union of German states headed jointly by Prussia and Austria. Opposed by Austria, the plan failed to win the adherence of the other large German states and had to be renounced by Prussia in the Punctation of Olmütz on November 29.

Gastein Convention

...and Prussia reached on Aug. 20, 1865, after their seizure of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark in 1864; it temporarily postponed the final struggle between them for hegemony over Germany. The pact provided that both the emperor of Austria and the king of Prussia were to be sovereign over the duchies, Prussia administering Schleswig and Austria administering Holstein (which...

German Confederation

organization of 39 German states, established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to replace the destroyed Holy Roman Empire. It was a loose political association, formed for mutual defense, with no central executive or judiciary. Delegates met in a federal assembly dominated by Austria. Amid a growing call for reform and economic integration, conservative leaders, including Klemens, prince von...

nationalism

...and even into the Near East, while at the same time, across the Atlantic, it aroused the Latin Americans. But Napoleon’s yoke of conquest turned the nationalism of the Europeans against France. In Germany the struggle was led by writers and intellectuals, who rejected all the principles upon which the American and the French revolutions had been based as well as the liberal and humanitarian...

North German Confederation

union of the German states north of the Main River formed in 1867 under Prussian hegemony after Prussia’s victory over Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War (1866). Berlin was its capital, the king of Prussia was its president, and the Prussian chancellor was also its chancellor. Its constitution served as a model for that of the German Empire, with which it merged in 1871.

Revolutions of 1848

In Austria, where the new ministers promised to grant constitutions, the monarchy withstood the storm; and in Prussia King Frederick William IV, who led the movement for the unification of Germany, hoisted the black, red, and gold flag that had become the symbol of German unity. The German governments agreed to the convocation of three constituent assemblies at Berlin, Vienna, and Frankfurt by...

Swabia

Swabia was one of the five great
Stamm (stem, or tribal) duchies of earlier medieval Germany—with Franconia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Lotharingia (Lorraine)—and was held by successive families. Rudolf of Rheinfelden, duke in 1057, was set up as German king in 1077 in opposition to Henry IV, who in 1079 appointed the rebel’s son-in-law, Frederick I of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia....

Napoleonic Europe

...French revolutionary legislation to much of western Europe. The powers of the Roman Catholic church, guilds, and manorial aristocracy came under the gun. The old regime was dead in Belgium, western Germany, and northern Italy.

19th-century political movements

In the Germanies, repeated outbreaks changed little the system imposed from Vienna by Metternich—censorship, spying on students and intellectuals, repression of group activities at the first sign of political or social advocacy. This drove original thought underground or abroad in the persons of refugees such as the poet Heine and later Karl Marx. At home, the prevailing mood was despair....

...interests. Except in Belgium, the surge of national, as distinct from liberal, aspirations throughout Europe was unsuccessful in the 1830s. Defeats only strengthened resolve, particularly in Germany and Italy, where the repeated invasions by the French during the revolutionary period had led to reforms and stimulated alike royal and popular ambitions. In these two regions, liberalism and...

Reformation

The Reformation movement within Germany diversified almost immediately, and other reform impulses arose independently of Luther. Huldrych Zwingli built a Christian theocracy in Zürich in which church and state joined for the service of God. Zwingli agreed with Luther in the centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith, but he espoused a different understanding of the Holy...

...in the Swedish state church (Lutheran), whose Reformation was introduced through a resolution of the imperial Diet of Västerås in 1527, with the cooperation of the Swedish bishops. In the German Evangelical (Lutheran and Reformed) territories, the bishops’ line of apostolic succession was ruptured by the Reformation. As imperial princes, the Roman Catholic German bishops of the 16th...

Gustav II Adolf

Thus, the fate of Europe was bound up with what happened in Livonia or Prussia. Protestant Europe was slow to appreciate the connection, but as the Protestant cause plunged to disaster in Germany, its leaders increasingly turned their eyes to Gustav as a possible saviour. But before he was prepared to commit himself to any Protestant league and undertake a military campaign in Germany, Gustav...

ships and shipping

...speed appealed greatly to the first-class passengers, who were willing to pay premium fares for a fast voyage. At the same time, the enlarged ships had increased space in the steerage, which the German lines in particular saw as a saleable item. Central Europeans were anxious to emigrate to avoid the repression that took place after the collapse of the liberal revolutions of 1848, the...

German ships of this period tended to be moderately slow and mostly carried both passengers and freight. In the late 1890s the directors of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company entered the high-class passenger trade by construction of a Blue Riband-class liner. Two ships were ordered—the 1,749-passenger
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (655 feet long overall; displacement...

role of Hitler

leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party (from 1920/21) and chancellor (
Kanzler) and Führer of Germany (1933–45). He was chancellor from January 30, 1933, and, after President Paul von Hindenburg’s death, assumed the twin titles of Führer and chancellor (August 2, 1934).

unification

The key centres of dynamic conservatism, however, were Italy and Germany. In the Italian state of Piedmont during the early 1850s, the able prime minister, Camillo di Cavour, conciliated liberals by sponsoring economic development and granting new personal freedoms. Cavour worked especially to capture the current of Italian nationalism. By a series of diplomatic maneuvers, he won an alliance...

World War I

Europe itself, by 1871, seemed to be entering an age of political and social progress. Britain’s Second Reform Act (1867), the French Third Republic (1875), the triumph of nationalism in Italy and Germany (1871), the establishment of universal manhood suffrage in Germany (1867), equality for the Hungarians in the Habsburg monarchy (1867), emancipation of the serfs in Russia (1861), and the...

...and Koblenz. A neutral zone of 10 kilometres on the right bank of the Rhine was also to be evacuated, the entire German navy surrendered, and the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest renounced. Germany was also to turn over a large number of locomotives, munitions, trucks, and other matériel—and to promise reparation for damage done.

...Berchtold, saw the crime as the occasion for measures to humiliate Serbia and so to enhance Austria-Hungary’s prestige in the Balkans. Conrad had already (October 1913) been assured by William II of Germany’s support if Austria-Hungary should start a preventive war against Serbia. This assurance was confirmed in the week following the assassination, before William, on July 6, set off upon his...

...of these political agitators, branding Erzberger and the leaders of the Social Democrats as the “November criminals” and advocating militaristic and expansionist policies by which Germany could redeem its defeat in the war, gain vengeance upon its enemies, and become the preeminent power in Europe.

biological weapons use

During World War I (1914–18) Germany initiated a clandestine program to infect horses and cattle owned by Allied armies on both the Western and Eastern fronts. The infectious agent for glanders was reported to have been used. For example, German agents infiltrated the United States and surreptitiously infected animals prior to their shipment across the Atlantic in support of Allied...

Caporetto

(Oct. 24, 1917), Italian military disaster during World War I in which Italian troops retreated before an Austro-German offensive on the Isonzo front, northwest of Trieste, where the Italian and Austrian forces had been stalemated for two and a half years. In the wake of the successful Austrian and German advance, more than 600,000 war-weary and demoralized Italian soldiers either deserted or...

Central Powers

World War I coalition that consisted primarily of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, the “central” European states that were at war from August 1914 against France and Britain on the Western Front and against Russia on the Eastern Front. The Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers on Oct. 29, 1914. Bulgaria came in on Oct. 14, 1915.

chemical warfare

However, once chemical warfare was introduced on the battlefield by the German army in 1915, chemical weapons were produced and employed by all the powers participating in World War I, and more than a million chemical casualties and an estimated 91,000 fatalities resulted. Following the war, Germany was forbidden to manufacture or import poison gas munitions under the terms of the Treaty of...

Entente Cordiale

...8, 1904), Anglo-French agreement that, by settling a number of controversial matters, ended antagonisms between Great Britain and France and paved the way for their diplomatic cooperation against German pressures in the decade preceding World War I (1914–18). The agreement in no sense created an alliance and did not entangle Great Britain with a French commitment to Russia (1894).

Fourteen Points

On Oct. 3–4, 1918, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the German imperial chancellor, sent a note, via Switzerland, to President Wilson, requesting an immediate armistice and the opening of peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Germans would later argue a “betrayal” when faced by the harsher terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles.

Krupp industries

a type of 420-mm (16.5-inch) howitzer that was first used by the German army to bombard Belgian and French forts during World War I. Officially designated as the 42-cm kurze Marinekanone 14 L/12 in Räderlafette (“42-cm short naval canon 14 L/12 on wheeled carriage”), the gun was nicknamed “Big Bertha” by German soldiers after one of its projectiles completely...

In World War I, Gustav Krupp made many contributions to Germany’s arsenal. One was the 98-ton howitzer that shelled Liège and Verdun. Others included the great cannon that bombarded Paris from a range of about 75 miles (120 km) and Germany’s submarines, which were built at the family’s Kiel shipyards. Because Germany was defeated, the war was, on the whole, bad business for Krupp but not...

“Lusitania” sinking

The
Lusitania was carrying a cargo of rifle ammunition and shells (together about 173 tons), and the Germans, who had circulated warnings that the ship would be sunk, felt themselves fully justified in attacking a vessel that was furthering the war aims of their enemy. The German government also felt that, in view of the vulnerability of U-boats while on the surface and the British...

Mata Hari

dancer and courtesan whose name has become a synonym for the seductive female spy. She was shot by the French on charges of spying for Germany during World War I. The nature and extent of her espionage activities remain uncertain, and her guilt is widely contested.

military aircraft

France and Germany, both aware of the military potential of aircraft, began relatively large-scale manufacturing around 1909. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, France had built a total of 2,000 airplanes, of which 1,500 were military; Germany ranked second with about 1,000 military aircraft; and Britain a distant third with 176. The United States lost its lead in aeronautics as the...

At the start of World War I the German armed forces had 10 zeppelins and three smaller airships, but this impressive offensive capability was largely offset by the highly explosive nature of the hydrogen gas that gave the zeppelins their lifting power. After losing three zeppelins in daylight raids over heavily defended areas in the first month of the war, the army abandoned airship operations,...

offensive battle tactics

For two thankless years—1915 and 1916—Foch, commanding the Northern Army Group, vainly tried to break through the German line in Artois and at the Somme, but he could not compensate for the lack of equipment and supplies. In May 1917 he was appointed chief of the war minister’s general staff, a position that made him adviser to the Allied armies. But advising was not commanding....

Prussian general who was mainly responsible for Germany’s military policy and strategy in the latter years of World War I. After the war he became a leader of reactionary political movements, for a while joining the Nazi Party and subsequently taking an independent, idiosyncratic right-radical line.

Remembering World War I

Liddell Hart, who was writing for the 13th edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica (1926), continued:

The Germans alone had a glimpse of the truth, but—one or two prophetic minds apart—the “Nation in Arms” theory evolved by them during the 19th century visualized the nation rather as a reservoir to pour its reinforcements into the...

Rethondes armistice

...of Salonika (Thessaloníka) with Bulgaria on Sept. 29, 1918, that of Mudros with Turkey on October 30, that of Villa Giusti with Austria-Hungary on November 3, and that of Rethondes with Germany on November 11—the conference did not open until Jan. 18, 1919. This delay was attributable chiefly to the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, who chose to have his mandate...

Russian Revolution of 1905

During World War I Lenin, living in neutral Switzerland, agitated for Russia’s defeat. This attracted the attention of the Germans, who came to realize that they could not win the war unless they somehow succeeded in forcing Russia to sign a separate peace. In April 1917 they arranged for Lenin’s transit through Germany to Sweden and thence to Russia, where they hoped the Bolsheviks would fan...

strategic planning

...opposing coalition’s weakest member. In the end, though, the war hinged on the main contest on the Western Front. It was there, in the fall of 1918, that the struggle was decided by the collapse of German forces after two brilliant but costly German offensives in the spring and summer of that year, followed by a remorseless set of Allied counterattacks.

Sussex Incident

(March 24, 1916), torpedoing of a French cross-channel passenger steamer, the
Sussex, by a German submarine, leaving 80 casualties, including two Americans wounded. The attack prompted a U.S. threat to sever diplomatic relations. The German government responded with the so-called Sussex pledge (May 4, 1916), agreeing to give adequate warning before sinking merchant and passenger ships...

U.S. policy and involvement

Difficulties arose first with the British government, which at once used its vast fleet to establish a long-range blockade of Germany. The U.S. State Department sent several strong protests to London, particularly against British suppression of American exports of food and raw materials to Germany. Anglo-American blockade controversies were not acute, however, because the British put their...

Verdun

(February 21–December 18, 1916), World War I engagement in which the French repulsed a major German offensive. It was one of the longest, bloodiest, and most-ferocious battles of the war; French casualties amounted to about 400,000, German ones to about 350,000. Some 300,000 were killed.

war reparations

...by the Allies to each other, especially to Britain, as well as those owed, especially by Britain, to the United States. A third baneful factor was reparations, the financial penalties imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.

World War II

For two decades after 1939, German guilt for the outbreak of World War II seemed incontestable. The Nürnberg war-crimes trials in 1946 brought to light damning evidence of Nazi ambitions, preparations for war, and deliberate provocation of the crises over Austria, the Sudetenland, and Poland. Revelation of Nazi tyranny, torture, and genocide was a powerful deterrent to anyone in the West...

...April, Eisenhower even called them back. Soviet forces, meanwhile, captured Vienna and Königsberg on April 9 and encircled Berlin by the 25th. Five days later a despairing Hitler declared that Germany had proved unworthy of him and committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Hitler’s successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, opened negotiations with the Western powers, hoping to save as many troops...

By the early part of 1939 the German dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to invade and occupy Poland. Poland, for its part, had guarantees of French and British military support should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize the possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western neighbour. Secret...

The surrender of the German forces in northwestern Europe was signed at Montgomery’s headquarters on Lüneburg Heath on May 4; and a further document, covering all the German forces, was signed with more ceremony at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims, in the presence of Soviet as well as U.S., British, and French delegations. At midnight on May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was officially...

Albania occupation

In October 1940 Italian forces used Albania as a military base to invade Greece, but they were quickly thrown back into Albania. After Nazi Germany defeated Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941, the regions of Kosovo and Çamëria were joined to Albania, thus creating an ethnically united Albanian state. The new state lasted until November 1944, when the Germans—who had replaced the...

Athens occupation

In the 1940s hideous things happened in Athens. During the German occupation many people died from starvation, and the city began to fall apart from lack of maintenance. When the Germans left, part of the Allied-equipped resistance refused to lay down its arms, and the civil war began. For a while the government held only the Parliament building, neighbouring embassies, and a part of...

Axis powers

the coalition headed by Germany, Italy, and Japan that opposed the Allied powers in World War II. The alliance originated in a series of agreements between Germany and Italy, followed by the proclamation of an “axis” binding Rome and Berlin (October 25, 1936), with the two powers claiming that the world would henceforth rotate on the Rome-Berlin axis. This was followed by the...

Baltic occupation

...to Arctic or desert regions of the U.S.S.R. were carried out. Estonia lost about 60,000 people, while Latvia and Lithuania lost about 35,000 each. The deportations were still under way when Germany attacked the U.S.S.R. on June 22, 1941.

Battle of Stalingrad

...World War II. Russians consider it to be one of the greatest battles of their Great Patriotic War, and most historians consider it to be the greatest battle of the entire conflict. It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union and marked the turning of the tide of war in favour of the Allies.

Battle of the Bulge

(Dec. 16, 1944–Jan. 16, 1945), the last major German offensive on the Western Front during World War II; an unsuccessful attempt to push the Allies back from German home territory. The name Battle of the Bulge was appropriated from Winston Churchill’s optimistic description, in May 1940, of the resistance that he mistakenly supposed was being offered to the Germans’ breakthrough in that...

Ciscaucasia

At the extreme limit of their penetration into Russia, in the autumn of 1942, the German armies overran parts of Ciscaucasia, and, in a drive toward the oil fields, they had by the end of October of that year reached the Georgian military highway leading to Tʿbilisi. The tide turned in November, when the Germans began to pull out of Caucasia to strengthen their forces in other sectors of...

control of Atlantic sea routes

in World War II, a contest between the Western Allies and the Axis powers (particularly Germany) for the control of Atlantic sea routes. For the Allied powers, the battle had three objectives: blockade of the Axis powers in Europe, security of Allied sea movements, and freedom to project military power across the seas. The Axis, in turn, hoped to frustrate Allied use of the Atlantic to wage...

Croatia

War broke out soon after the Sporazum was signed, and Yugoslavia declared its neutrality. Invasion, occupation, and partition followed in 1941. In their campaign against Yugoslavia, the Germans exploited Croatian discontent, presenting themselves as liberators and inciting Croats in the armed forces to mutiny. In April 1941 Germans and Italians set up the Independent State of Croatia, which...

Dunkirk evacuation

The immediate context of the Dunkirk evacuation was Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries and northern France in May 1940. On May 10 the German attack on the Netherlands began with the capture by parachutists of key bridges deep within the country, with the aim of opening the way for mobile ground forces. The Dutch defenders fell back westward, and by noon on May 12 German tanks were on the...

Finland

After the Treaty of Moscow the plan for a Nordic defense union was resumed. The Soviet Union still objected, however, and the plan was thus abandoned. In December 1940 President Kyösti Kallio resigned, and Ryti was elected in his place. When the tension between Germany and the Soviet Union grew in the spring of 1941, Finland approached Germany but did not conclude a formal agreement....

Indian independence movement

...the British government into releasing him. On Jan. 26, 1941, though closely watched, he escaped from his Calcutta residence in disguise and, traveling via Kabul and Moscow, eventually reached Germany in April.

July Plot

During 1943 and early 1944, opposition to Hitler in high army circles increased as Germany’s military situation deteriorated. Plans for the coup, code-named Walküre (“Valkyrie”), were set late in 1943, but Hitler, increasingly suspicious, became more difficult to access and often abruptly changed his schedule, thus thwarting a number of earlier attempts on his life.

Katyn Massacre

After Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union concluded their Nonaggression Pact of 1939 and Germany invaded Poland from the west, Soviet forces occupied the eastern half of Poland. As a consequence of this occupation, tens of thousands of Polish military personnel fell into Soviet hands and were interned in prison camps inside the Soviet Union. But after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union (June...

Krupp munitions industry

Adolf Hitler’s policy of military conquest switched the Krupp combine back to armament products. During World War II the aged Gustav was succeeded by his eldest son, Alfried von Bohlen und Halbach, who, by the Lex Krupp (Krupp Law) of 1943, assumed the name Krupp and became the sole owner of his mother’s vast holdings. Even before 1939, the extent of these holdings had become staggering. Within...

Alfried Krupp was the son of Bertha Krupp, the heiress of the Krupp industrial empire, and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II it became evident that his father was drifting into senility. Alfried assumed his duties, and in 1943 Adolf Hitler issued an unprecedented decree, the Lex Krupp (“Krupp Law”), which, abolishing in this one case the...

Kursk

(July 5–August 23, 1943), unsuccessful German assault on the Soviet salient around the city of Kursk, in western Russia, during World War II. The salient was a bulge in the Soviet lines that stretched 150 miles (240 km) from north to south and protruded 100 miles (160 km) westward into the German lines. In an attempt to recover the offensive on the Eastern Front, the Germans planned a...

military aircraft

Germany’s aircraft industry after World War I was heavily restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1921–22 the constraints were eased, and a productive light-aircraft industry began to develop. When restrictions were basically abolished in 1926, a number of new ventures were formed; those which survived included such companies as Arado, Dornier, Focke-Wulf, Junkers, and Heinkel. When...

North Africa campaigns

...and Italy to jointly oppose German rearmament and expansion. In fact, just the opposite happened: fascist Italy turned its back to the democratic West and took to the road of alliance with Nazi Germany. On October 25, 1936, the Rome-Berlin Axis was proclaimed, but Italy, its strength depleted by the Ethiopian campaign and by its support for Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War,...

Operation Barbarossa

during World War II, code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which was launched on June 22, 1941. The failure of German troops to defeat Soviet forces in the campaign signaled a crucial turning point in the war.

Partisans

Germany and Italy occupied Yugoslavia in April 1941, but it was not until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of that year that the Yugoslav communists were ordered to mount attacks against Axis units. Under the direction of the party leader, Josip Broz Tito, Partisan detachments conducted small-scale sabotage until September 1941, when they occupied the Serbian town of Užice and...

Potsdam Conference

The Potsdam Conference’s Declaration on Germany stated, “It is the intention of the Allies that the German people be given the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis.” The four occupation zones of Germany conceived at the Yalta Conference were set up, each to be administered by the commander-in-chief of the Soviet,...

Quebec Conference

...and Cairo later that year. Roosevelt and Churchill met again at Quebec the following year—the Octagon Conference, September 11–16, 1944. The decision made there to advance against Germany on two western fronts, instead of pursuing a concerted drive on Berlin, was criticized in the postwar period because it allowed the Soviet army to take possession of the German capital. This...

resistance movements

in European history, any of various secret and clandestine groups that sprang up throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II to oppose Nazi rule. The exact number of those who took part is unknown, but they included civilians who worked secretly against the occupation as well as armed bands of partisans or guerrilla fighters. Their activities ranged from publishing clandestine...

Saint Petersburg invasion

Then once again the city was struck by a period of loss and destruction. It was one of the initial targets of the German invasion in 1941; by September of that year, German troops were on the outskirts of the city and had cut off communication with the rest of the U.S.S.R., while Finnish troops advanced from the north. Many of the inhabitants and nearly three-fourths of the industrial plant...

Siege of Leningrad

prolonged siege (September 8, 1941–January 27, 1944) of the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union by German and Finnish armed forces during World War II. The siege actually lasted 872 days.

Slovenia

After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Slovenia was partitioned. Italy took the southwest, including Ljubljana; Germany annexed the north directly into the Reich; and Hungary recovered Prekmurje. Although the Slovenes had been deemed racially salvageable by the Nazis, the mainly Austrian rulers of the Carinthian and Styrian regions commenced a brutal campaign to destroy them as a...

strategic planning

German chain of command

The military command structure of German forces in Europe in mid-1944 reflected the growing megalomania of the Führer and supreme commander of the armed forces, Adolf Hitler, as well as the rigidity of the Nazi state. All military operations in the western theatre were placed under the direction of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW; Armed Forces High Command); this body reported to...

Ultra intelligence project’s effect

Allied intelligence project that tapped the very highest level of encrypted communications of the German armed forces, as well as those of the Italian and Japanese armed forces, and thus contributed to the Allied victory in World War II. At Bletchley Park, a British government establishment located north of London, a small group of code breakers developed techniques for decrypting intercepted...

Switzerland

...phase of the war was in the summer of 1940, when France had unexpectedly fallen and Switzerland was surrounded by the Axis powers. The only open tunnel to Vichy France closed in late 1942 when Germany occupied the southern part of France. When most Swiss feared that they would become the next victim of Nazi expansionism, federal councillor Marcel Pilet-Golaz gave a speech on June 25, 1940,...

Tehrān Conference

...provided by the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 and by the Russo-Finnish Treaty of 1940, but he also stated that it would want the Baltic coast of East Prussia. Though the settlement for Germany was discussed at length, all three Allied leaders appeared uncertain; their views were imprecise on the topic of a postwar international organization; and, on the Polish question, the western...

Tobruk

...fighting in the North African theatre of operations. The British captured the port from the Italians in January 1941, taking 25,000 prisoners in the process. The British were then forced by the Germans to withdraw to the east, leaving Tobruk an isolated British garrison that was periodically besieged by the Germans (March 1941–June 1942) when the Germans captured the city, taking...

Vichy France

The Franco-German Armistice of June 22, 1940, divided France into two zones: one to be under German military occupation and one to be left to the French in full sovereignty, at least nominally. The unoccupied zone comprised the southeastern two-fifths of the country, from the Swiss frontier near Geneva to a point 12 miles (19 km) east of Tours and thence southwest to the Spanish frontier, 30...

Warsaw occupation

...forced a surrender. The subsequent Nazi occupation was aimed at reducing Warsaw to a provincial city; its cultural treasures were systematically plundered and its inhabitants carried away to German labour camps or to concentration camps.

Yalta Conference

...of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, which met at Yalta in Crimea to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany.

historiography

Although Ranke’s influence was enhanced by his longevity (he lived to the age of 91), it was mainly due to the seductive synthesis he offered. He maintained that scholarship could produce historical truth; he held a conception of the divine will that linked it to the existing nation-states of 19th-century Europe; and he possessed a considerable literary gift. Even in Germany, however, his sway...

post-1989: reunified Germany

The swift and unexpected downfall of the German Democratic Republic was triggered by the decay of the other communist regimes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The liberalizing reforms of President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union appalled the Honecker regime, which in desperation was by 1988 forbidding the circulation within East Germany of Soviet publications that it viewed as...

effect on Cold War

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to unravel. By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. The Americans and the British feared the...

European integration

...Cold War nonetheless imposed stability on Europe and allowed the western sector, at least, to prosper as never before. The end of Communism, therefore, posed several vexing questions. Would a united Germany dominate Europe economically and waver dangerously between East and West in foreign policy? Could the new democracies of east-central Europe achieve Western levels of prosperity and avoid the...

reunification

...Kohl to begin immediate measures toward reunification in order to stem the tide. On November 28, 1989, he shocked the world with his announcement of a 10-point plan under which the East and West German governments would gradually expand their cooperation on specific issues until full economic, then political unity was achieved. He proposed no timetable and sought to appease the Soviets and...

role of Gorbachev

...and Czechoslovakia in late 1989–90, Gorbachev agreed to the phased withdrawal of Soviet troops from those countries. By the summer of 1990 he had agreed to the reunification of East with West Germany and even assented to the prospect of that reunified nation’s becoming a member of the Soviet Union’s longtime enemy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1990 Gorbachev received the...

radio broadcasting history

During the 1920s early German radio was operated by a variety of private owners and supported by both license fees and advertising revenues. Slowly centralized in the early 1930s, radio fell under Nazi control in 1933, causing the somewhat varied programming of independent German stations to quickly give way to a more national service by the mid-1930s. Considerable time was given to commentary...

After Germany’s defeat, the occupying powers immediately decentralized radio to the
länder (states) and encouraged regional, cultural, and news content. These stations were supervised in part by elected advisory councils of local citizens. The Soviet zone, which became the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany), operated a centralized...

...as a means of reducing horrendous medium-wave overcrowding and interference problems. It also helped serve regions largely unreached by existing stations. As part of the rebuilding of its industry, Germany led Europe in beginning FM broadcasting. The first FM transmissions were on the air by 1949, and most of West Germany was covered with FM signals by 1951. Sale of FM receivers was brisk (some...

response to Holocaust

...religious—had participated or been complicit in the Nazi crimes or been ineffective in opposing them. In an effort to rehabilitate the good name of the German people, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) firmly established a democracy that protected the human rights of all its citizens and made financial reparations to the Jewish people in an agreement passed by parliament in...

West Germany

For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones. The American, British, and French zones together made up the western two-thirds of Germany, while the Soviet zone comprised the eastern third. Berlin, the former capital, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone, was placed under joint four-power authority but was partitioned into four...

Following the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate. The German state had ceased to exist, and sovereign authority passed to the victorious Allied powers. The physical devastation from Allied bombing campaigns and from ground battles was enormous: an estimated one-fourth of the country’s housing was destroyed or damaged beyond use, and in many...

Adenauer’s administration

...Allies decided to give their three occupation zones a federal-state organization. Adenauer became president of the Parliamentary Council, which produced a provisional constitution for the intended German Federal Republic. In 1949 Adenauer became chairman of the CDU for the whole of West Germany, and, in the first general elections under the new regime, his party and its regular ally, the...

Berlin blockade

...United States, the United Kingdom, and France) to abandon their post-World War II jurisdictions in West Berlin. In March 1948 the Allied powers decided to unite their different occupation zones of Germany into a single economic unit. In protest, the Soviet representative withdrew from the Allied Control Council. Coincident with the introduction of a new deutsche mark in West Berlin (as...

With communist ministers in the postwar governments of Belgium, France, and Italy, and with communists fomenting political strikes, some feared similar takeovers in the West. Germany, however, was the scene of the sharpest clash. For several years, by a leapfrog process of move and countermove, the eastern and western occupation zones of Germany had gradually been solidifying into separate...

Berlin Wall

...access to it from East Berlin and adjacent areas of East Germany during the period from 1961 to 1989. In the years between 1949 and 1961, about 2.5 million East Germans had fled from East to West Germany, including steadily rising numbers of skilled workers, professionals, and intellectuals. Their loss threatened to destroy the economic viability of the East German state. In response,...

currency reform

The West German currency reform that produced the western deutsche mark was a courageous act. It exchanged one deutsche mark for 10 obsolete reichsmarks; later the rate was slightly reduced. In one respect, the result was similar to that of Weimar’s hyperinflation; paper savings were suddenly devalued. This time, however, there was a limit to any losses. What was more, quite small quantities of...

Denmark

...in 1950 and 1951 and were further complemented by armaments from the United States. Denmark nevertheless rejected a request by the United States to establish air bases on Danish territory. With West Germany’s admission to NATO, Denmark succeeded in obtaining guarantees—formalized in the Bonn Protocol of 1955—for the rights of the Danish minority in South Schleswig.

East Germany

European treaties

The term
supranational is of recent origin and is used to describe the type of treaty structure developed originally by six western European states: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The first treaty was that of Paris, signed in 1951, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC); the second, the Rome treaty, signed in 1957,...

foreign occupation and partitioning

Four-power cooperation in Germany continued to deteriorate. The Americans had agreed at Potsdam to reparations-in-kind but opposed extreme efforts by the Soviets and the French to pauperize the Germans lest the burden of feeding them fall entirely on the American taxpayer. What was more, the Soviets would be unwilling (in Kennan’s view) to countenance centralized German institutions unless they...

The Marshall Plan’s manifold effects included the hardening of the division of Europe, the movement for integration within western Europe, and the creation of the two Germanies. “Bizonia,” the product of an economic merger between the U.S. and British occupation zones, was announced on May 29, 1947, and a new U.S. policy followed on July 11 that ended Germany’s punitive period and...

formation of Federal Republic of Germany

...in Washington, D.C., providing for mutual aid in case of attack against any member. On May 8, the West German parliamentary council adopted a constitution, and on May 23 the Federal Republic of Germany came into being. Stalin acknowledged defeat in Berlin and lifted the blockade on May 12, but the Soviets countered by creating mirror institutions—the German Democratic Republic (Oct....

France

...force (MLF) under NATO command. First suggested in December 1960, the MLF was pushed by Kennedy and Johnson, but de Gaulle responded with contempt, while Adenauer feared to join lest he damage West German relations with France. The idea of an MLF died in 1965, and in July 1966 de Gaulle took the final step of withdrawing French armed forces from NATO (though France remained a political member...

Oder-Neisse Line

...border devised by the Allied powers at the end of World War II; it transferred a large section of German territory to Poland and was a matter of contention between the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the Soviet bloc for 15 years.

Ostpolitik

...in 1970, and Nixon’s escalations of the war in Southeast Asia. Substantial moves toward East–West détente had already been made in Europe, however. Following de Gaulle’s lead, the West German foreign minister, Willy Brandt, a Socialist and former mayor of West Berlin, had made overtures toward Moscow. After becoming chancellor in 1969 he pursued a thorough
Ostpolitik...

political and economic integration

In early disputes over the occupation of Germany, France often sided with the U.S.S.R. in order to keep Germany weak and obtain reparations. The Berlin crisis of 1948, however, convinced the French that a way must be found to reconcile German recovery with their own security. The architects of an integrationist solution were the French technocrat Jean Monnet and Foreign Minister Robert Schuman....

rearmament

The conventional buildup set in motion under the Truman administration had one important requirement: that the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) be rearmed. That set in motion a sharp debate in Europe that was coloured by memories of the recent war, but in 1955 a formula was found in which West Germany rearmed but was permitted no chemical or nuclear weapons and was part of NATO’s...

Saarland referendum

...Saar in an economic union with France. By 1954, however, West Germany’s renewed prosperity was attracting the sympathies of most Saarlanders, and in that year France and the Federal Republic of Germany agreed to a statute that provided for Saar’s autonomy under a European commissioner. The new status was to be approved by a referendum; however, 68 percent of Saar’s voters rejected the...

Stasi espionage

...surveillance and intelligence gathering through its Main Administration for Foreign Intelligence (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). Its foreign espionage activities were largely directed against the West German government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Under Markus Wolf, its chief of foreign operations from 1958 to 1987, the Stasi extensively penetrated West Germany’s government and...

U.S.

...policy, known as containment, a term suggested by its principal framer, George Kennan, resulted in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as in the decision to make the western zones of Germany (later West Germany) a pillar of strength. When the Soviet Union countered this development in June 1948 by blocking all surface routes into the western-occupied zones of Berlin, Britain and...